The present invention is concerned with a device for piling up flat workpieces such as box blanks and creating batches of box blanks standing on their edges from the piles of box blanks.
Box blanks are cut and creased for instance by a printing and die cutting machine and are generally delivered in the form of separate piles within the delivery station of the machine. This operation can be carried out either manually or automatically in event of high production speed. If the box blanks are delivered manually, the user will first of all be compelled to collect a certain number of blanks in the stream traveling from the machine with the number of the blanks in a particular batch being identified by a laterally displaced or shifted blank in the stream of blanks. Thereafter, the user will set up the pile by an operation which includes knocking the edges of the pile along one side of the pile as well as along the adjacent side on a table to make sure that the pile is reliably straight and aligned.
If the box blanks are delivered automatically, the delivering device consists of a compartments which have a front stop and side guide. Since the box blanks leave the delivery station in the form of up to eleven individual streams which depend on the particular run and which streams are arranged over the whole width of the delivery station, it is necessary to invision a considerable number of side guides to insure proper guidance of each of the streams of boxes. The sides of the blanks as well as the side-wise position of each stream is variable and all the lateral guides must be constructed to be positioned with regard to one another. Obviously, the construction of such delivery station and its adjustment for a particular batch of the blank is carried out with great accuracy and involves a lengthy set up operation. In addition, the setting up of the delivery station of the device depends on the side-wise position of every blank stream arriving at the delivery station. Such a dependence is a handicap, for in the course of a run, the user often happens to be compelled to somewhat modify the interval existing between the various streams at the beginning of their shaping and at the station before the delivery station. In such a case all the settings carried out previously should be recorded and corrected and this correction will entail a necessity of stopping the machine.